Theoretical Foyer

at Washington Street

Installation

Cody Hoyt’s installation transforms the corner of Seventh Street and Washington Street by replacing more than 2500 existing monochromatic sidewalk bricks with new and brightly colored concrete bricks fabricated in Columbus. Using the colors from the Alexander Girard-designed seat cushions at the Miller House and Garden, Hoyt has created a vibrant motif that invites visitors to imagine new ways to use this corner as a platform for events and happenings.

Designer

Cody Hoyt is a Brooklyn based ceramicist. Self­-taught in the medium, Hoyt describes his practice as process­ based, which involves rigorously drawing each piece over and over, hand­ marbling clay, and constructing highly­ individualized form. His work brings to mind frescoes, tiled floors, mosaics, marquetry, and inlay design traditions that go back centuries. Hoyt brings his own contemporary sensibility to these designs and creates forms from slabs using invented handbuilding techniques that reference origami, the machine age, and cubist space.

Fabrication Sponsor

Selected by

Patrick Parrish Gallery is based in New York and was founded by Patrick Parrish in 2000. The gallery exhibits the unusual, new, and sometimes overlooked modernist designers and artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The gallery is known for offering rising artists and designers their first New York solo show while also holding a deep, incisively curated selection of works by American, Italian, French, and other European designers, artists, and craftspeople.

Material and Fabrication

Cody Hoyt hand-crafted each of Theoretical Foyer’s 2,300 triangular concrete bricks at Shelby Materials in Columbus. After experimenting with a PVC prototype mold, he designed laser-cut interlocking 12-gauge steel molds that could form 50 bricks at once. Cody carefully planned the concrete mix and coloring process to achieve 14 rich, saturated colors. Sometimes using six molds simultaneously, he worked long days to hand-mix each batch of concrete and form all the bricks. The molds were screwed down to plywood lined with plastic sheets that created varying levels of surface texture on each brick. Volunteers helped move bricks and remove the old clay pavers from the installation site, but Cody formed and laid each new brick himself. After the design was completed, he applied a satin-finish sealer and hydraulic sand to help the bricks withstand rain and pedestrian traffic.

I imagined a meta-architecture, an addition that acts as a symbolic starting place for everything around it. I designed a theoretical walkway that connects these elements of the city.